The names of two people I know distantly came in the place of <name>. Two times it was the same message with one person’s name and the third time, it came with the second person’s name. I tried contacting these two people to see whether they had in anyway done something to trigger this sort of an action and to my surprise, one of them didn’t even know my phone number!

Why would I want to reply to something to stop that I did not ask for in the first place? It would have made sense if these people were my service providers or something. The funny thing being that I do not receive any sort of promotional messages because of having activated DND.

Still, I got this message. Really scary, if you know what I mean.

Please do let me know if there is anyone whom I can complaint to about this and make this stop.

UPDATE (24th April 2012): I happened to call my bsnl customer care and told them that this was happening. At first they said that it was something that they could not do anything about. But I kept on drilling them with questions and I even said I would raise a complaint against them. On hearing that, they told me to hang on a minute. After their private inquires, they got back to me and told me that they had deactivated it! I asked them then how the hell it came to be activated without my knowing. They were stammering and finally told me that the culprit might be the shop from where I actually took my sim card and cut the call.

So that means there is some shady deal between the telephone operators and facebook where our personal phone numbers are being shared without our permission! Have to get to the shop where I bought my sim from. Updates later folks!

UPDATE (2nd June 2012): I again received a message today from the same number saying that someone wanted to connect to me on facebook. I dialled them up again and asked them what the heck was going on. And then they tell me to type “UNSUBFB” and send it to 53733!

So I told them I had not subscribed to it in the first place and I wanted to know how this thing started coming in the first place. Obviously, they had no answer. They have told me to call them back after two hours. I’ll update the post with what happens then.

UPDATE(2nd August 2012): After a gap (in which I thought that I was done with these messages), I again received one today. I called them and waiting for 12 minutes, one guy picked up. Telling him about the problem, he forwarded my call to the senior there. I had to wait for f’ing 45 minutes before that idiot received my call!

After telling him the problem, I told him I wanted to know how this started coming. He wanted me to take “phone settings -> network -> manual -> other network” in order to stop this from happening. I told him that I was not interested in getting it stopped and that I wanted to know how it started!

Suddenly, he was like, “Hello, sir, what, i..” and he cut the call! When I tried calling again, choosing the option to talk with the customer care executive, they have this automated reply that makes us go round and round in a loop! “Press 1 for a 2 for b and 3 for c” When you press one, you get “Press 1 for d 2 for e and 3 for f”. Now if you press anything, the menu stays here itself, giving you the only option of cutting the call.

I think these guy have been bribed by someone not to give out that information.

Oh yes. Even the Java facebook app for “dumbphones” attempts to lick all contacts from the phone book, luckily most such phones will warn the user that it’s about to happen so it can be rejected. Android just activesyncs everything with facebook continously if you have that app installed – check it up. Incredibly obnoxious, but it’s facebook so what do you expect.

for me.. the world is over. If you’re scared by knowing about the phone numbers and facebook, or changing e-mail addres… idealab.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/06/facebook-confirms-changing-users-default-email-addresses-more-changes-coming.php gps etc etc etc

here, in brazil, most sites are leaving the good and old html4 or the new html 5 and using the… FBML, a subset of HTML to be embeded in facebook, view the source of sites like villaprefeito.com.br.

Except for the fact that this is because of the facebook apps that our friends install on their phones, which allow that app to access the contact database on that phone, I haven’t been able to debug it further.